Trying to find a particular post that you saw the other day (or month or year) on Reddit can feel like searching for a lost needle on a beach. And to make matters worse, Reddit’s search engine is notorious for being inept, inaccurate, and ineffective.

There’s nothing you can do to solve the inherent problems of Reddit’s search engine, but you can improve the quality of search results by using a handful of different advanced search modifiers.

title:[text] searches only post titles.

author:[username] searches only posts by the given username.

selftext:[text] searches only the body of posts that were made as self-posts.

subreddit:[name] searches only posts that were submitted to the given subreddit community.

url:[text] searches only the URL of non-self-post posts.

site:[text] searches only the domain name of non-self-post posts.

nsfw:yes or nsfw:no to filter results based on whether they were marked as NSFW or not.

self:yes or self:no to filter results based on whether they were self-posts or not.

Feel free to use multiple search modifiers if you want. In fact, you should! And you can also use boolean operators to make clear the intent of your search query.

AND means you want both sides to be true.

OR means only one side needs to be true.

You can use parentheses () to group modifiers together in case the search query is a complex mixture of ANDs and ORs.

You can negate/exclude certain modifiers by preceding them with – (minus sign).